In conversation with Will Evans, Deep Vellum
David Szalay’s 2025 Booker Prize–winning Flesh tells the propulsive, hypnotic, and intimate story of a man at odds with himself. István is a shy Hungarian teenager drawn into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to his peers, his mother, and himself. He follows the fickle goodwill of strangers, charting a rocky upward trajectory that lands him further from his abruptly ended childhood than he could possibly imagine.
“Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.
David Szalay has wielded his astute handling of contemporary masculinity in his novels Turbulence, London and the South-East, and All That Man Is.
